Cosmo Scharf

LA Weekly wrote in 2016 that he had moved from New York to Los Angeles to attend the film school of the University of Southern CaliforniaUniversity of Southern CaliforniaThe University of Southern California (USC) is a private research university in Los Angeles, California, planned by a group led by Judge Robert Maclay Widney and opened to students in 1880.Open the full entry, and that in 2014, while he was still a college student, virtual reality technology changed his ambitions.⁠[1]

The Daily Trojan described him in August 2014 as a junior majoring in cinematic arts. He said in that article that about half a year earlier he had read a blog post about a game developer’s reaction to ValveValveValve is a video game company based in Washington State, United States. Founded in 1996 by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, it developed games including Half-Life and operates the PC game distribution platform Steam.Open the full entry’s virtual reality prototype, which set off his interest in virtual reality; he then followed the Oculus forum on RedditRedditReddit is an online platform that organizes content and discussion around interest-based communities, founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. Users take part in communities by posting, commenting, and voting; its operating company, Reddit, Inc., listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024.Open the full entry and listened to the RevVR podcast. He said that a few days before Facebook acquired Oculus he had met most of the company’s executives in person at GDC in San Francisco: “I had just met most of the executives of Oculus in person at GDC in San Francisco days prior to the acquisition.”⁠[2]

He said that after hearing the RevVR podcast discuss people who were setting up virtual reality meetups he searched online, found none in Los Angeles, and decided to build a community himself, although he had no idea how he would do it. The Voices of VR show notes state that he first became interested after hearing of Valve’s involvement in virtual reality and then read the Oculus forum on Reddit and listened to podcasts.⁠[2][3]

In August 2014 he said in the Daily Trojan that he was building software with his colleagues Jonnie Ross, Adam Levin and Gil Baron that would let traditional filmmakers tell stories in virtual reality.⁠[2]

Visionary VR’s press release of March 2016 states that the Los Angeles company was founded in 2014, when VRLA co-founders Jonnie Ross, Adam Levin and Cosmo Scharf joined forces with Gil Baron, a visual effects veteran and the company’s chief executive, and the game designer Luke Patterson.⁠[4][5]

He started VRLA (Virtual Reality Los Angeles), a virtual reality meetup in Los Angeles. On March 17, 2014 Road to VR published an announcement of the first meetup, which describes VRLA as a monthly virtual reality meetup in Los Angeles and him as its organizer; the first meetup was set for Monday, April 7, from 7:00 to 10:30 p.m. on Digital Domain’s motion-capture stage in Playa Vista, and the exhibitors and presenters listed include Oculus VR, Epson, Survios, Condition One, Kite & Lightning and High Fidelity, with Jonnie Ross due to give a presentation on storytelling in virtual reality.⁠[6][2]

Road to VR’s page for episode 57 of the Rev VR Podcast calls him the founder of VRLA and states that he decided to organize a meetup after listening to the podcast’s discussion of planning virtual reality meetups; the first meetup was held on a motion-capture stage of Digital Domain, a Hollywood digital effects company; a meetup needed a venue, food, parking and sponsors, and he got most of this set up with a little help, while Epson paid for the food and demonstrated its Moverio BT-200 augmented reality headset. He gave his view of Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus VR there, and Philip Rosedale presented his new High Fidelity system.⁠[7]

Accounts of the attendance at the first meetup differ: Road to VR gives almost 200 people; the Voices of VR show notes give more than 200 and state that the meetup took place weeks after Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus; Noah J. Nelson’s article on HuffPost, which places the first meetup about two years before it was written, gives about a hundred.⁠[7][3][8]

Noah J. Nelson wrote that the volunteer group behind the first meetup was assembled through Reddit by him, then a USC student. LA Weekly wrote that he found people who shared his interest on the internet and that together they started VRLA, a group of people from different backgrounds and even different generations; co-founder John Root was then employed at Digital Domain, and Matt Groening attended the first meetup. The Voices of VR show notes state that Nonny de la Peña also attended the first VRLA.⁠[8][1][3]

Sources describe his role at VRLA differently: Road to VR and the Daily Trojan call him its founder; LA Weekly wrote in September 2014 that Jonnie Ross co-founded the meetup with him and that Adam Levin worked with the two on the events, and in 2016 listed him with Jonnie Ross, Adam Levin and John Root as co-founders; Visionary VR’s 2016 press release calls Jonnie Ross, Adam Levin and him the co-founders of VRLA.⁠[7][2][9][1][4]

On June 8, 2014 the Voices of VR podcast, hosted by Kent Bye, published its episode 17, whose show notes describe him as a film student and co-founder of VRLA. The topics listed in the show notes are, in order: the first VRLA; that many people in the film industry see virtual reality as the future of storytelling and entertainment and that he wants to make emotionally engaging experiences; that virtual reality is a new medium and how to tell a story well without relying on the established techniques of film; that film has tools for directing attention, such as depth of field and camera direction; his division of experiences into fully interactive ones like video games, semi-interactive cinematic ones and fully passive ones, the fully passive kind being little studied so far; his familiarity with Nonny de la Peña’s work and virtual reality as a means of building empathy; his wish to see experiences like Mass Effect, in which the user chooses what to say to characters, and natural feedback between the user and artificial-intelligence characters; and his firm belief that virtual reality is the future of storytelling, video games, computing and the spreading of information, with portable headsets and a convergence of augmented reality with virtual reality.⁠[3]

The episode page links his Twitter account under the handle cosmoblosmo and gives the link to VRLA’s page on the Meetup website.⁠[3]

A Road to VR article of July 6, 2014 calls VRLA “the brainchild of one Cosmo Scharf,” describing him as a film production student at the University of Southern California and a self-confessed “VR Evangelist.” The article mentions VRLA’s VR Mixer event at the E3 Expo the month before and states that the second meetup took place on the preceding Monday at the Mixed Reality Labs (MxR) of the University of Southern California, a virtual reality research facility normally closed to the public, to which he arranged access; a few hundred guests attended.⁠[10]

The article states that inside the lab the demonstrations included Project Blue Shark, redirected walking, rapid avatar scanning, portable immersive viewers on devices such as the iPad, a light stage for full-body scanning and Nonny de la Peña’s Syria journalism environment, while the exhibitors in the parking lot were Sixense, Epic GamesEpic GamesEpic Games is a video game and software company headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, founded by Tim Sweeney in 1991, known for the Unreal Engine game engine, Fortnite and the Epic Games Store, and widely noted for its antitrust lawsuits against Apple and Google.Open the full entry (showing Couch Knights on the DK2), Control VR and KOR-FX, along with the independent games Classroom Aquatic, Rhea, Diplopia and Eden River; the audio equipment company Apogee supported the event.⁠[10]

The Daily Trojan wrote in August 2014 that VRLA had held three meetups, which had featured Oculus showcases, Jaunt and a virtual reality version of Flappy Bird and had drawn hundreds of people, among them SnapchatSnapchatA visual messaging and social app developed by Snap Inc., launched in 2011, with photo and video messaging, Stories, augmented-reality Lenses, Snap Map and Spotlight.Open the full entry chief executive Evan SpiegelEvan SpiegelEvan Spiegel is an American entrepreneur who, while a student at Stanford University in 2011, developed the disappearing-photo app Snapchat with Bobby Murphy and others, and has served since 2012 as Chief Executive Officer of its parent company, Snap Inc. Snap went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2017 with non-voting shares; he has made a long-running bet on the augmented reality glasses Spectacles and Specs.Open the full entry, Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons,” and the writer David X. Cohen; he said that VRLA had nearly 450 members on the Meetup website and that “Our goal is to make each event bigger and better than the previous event.” He planned to focus on education and content creation through hackathons and presentations and to give developers early feedback on their software. LA Weekly wrote that by its third event the group drew more than 600 virtual reality professionals and fans.⁠[2][9]

The Daily Trojan wrote that he planned VRLA while keeping up with his schoolwork. He considered the University of Southern California to be at the forefront of virtual reality but not to be doing enough: “I won’t be satisfied until we have classes specifically designed to teach students how to make content for VR.” He said that when the Rift launched there would be an enormous opportunity for the first developers to sell content in its app store. The article states that Oculus Rift headsets had been used for campus tours and might in future contribute to medical breakthroughs. He was considering changing his major to interactive media and said, “I really want to focus on making content for VR.”⁠[2]

LA Weekly wrote on September 22, 2014 that the first Proto Awards for virtual reality had been held the previous Friday night in the Blossom Room of the Roosevelt Hotel before at least 300 people, and that the awards were founded by Jonnie Ross; it describes him as a 19-year-old USC student who launched VRLA, a film student trying to transfer to interactive media. He said, “As a career, I really want to be a part of VR,” which was why he had started the meetup.⁠[9]

LA Weekly wrote in 2016 that the idea of a virtual reality awards show was put to him in 2014 by his friend Jonnie Ross during a road trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and that Jonnie Ross recalled having said, “Someone’s going to do it. We should do it because we would make it awesome.” The Proto Awards took place less than six months after the first VRLA meetup; the article calls Jonnie Ross a co-founder of the awards and Adam Levin their executive producer.⁠[1]

The Los Angeles Times article “In virtual reality, a start-up frenzy” of May 31, 2015 states that in March of that year 65 virtual reality start-ups showed their products to 2,000 attendees at a conference in downtown Los Angeles; it describes him as an event organizer and co-founder of Visionary VR, which it says creates virtual reality video, and quotes him as saying that virtual reality “used to be our secret that no one knew was going to be important” and that “Just in this last year alone, we’ve witnessed firsthand a transformation.”⁠[11]

Noah J. Nelson wrote on HuffPost that the Meetup group had long since evolved into The Virtual Reality Foundation, which had also set up its own awards ceremony, the Proto Awards; the next VRLA Expo was set for August 29 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, with a target capacity of 3,000.⁠[8]

On August 18, 2015 Road to VR published episode 108 of the Rev VR Podcast, titled “VRLA Summer Expo & The Proto Awards with Cosmo Scharf.” The host, Reverend Kyle, calls him a good friend of the podcast who was returning to talk about the virtual reality events taking place in Los Angeles that year; the episode description states that the expo was sold out and would have more than 2,000 attendees and that the second Proto Awards were about to be held.⁠[12]

Derrik J. Lang of the Associated PressAssociated PressThe Associated Press is a cooperative news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it is the oldest and largest news agency in the United States.Open the full entry wrote that the one-day VRLA expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center, which the article calls the third annual event, was sold out and drew more than 2,000 attendees, with waits of over an hour for some experiences. As a co-founder of VRLA he addressed the crowd at the start of the day: “It really feels like the momentum has shifted,” and “More people care about VR today than ever before”; he also said that there were then 733 virtual reality companies in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry and that virtual reality start-ups had raised more than $800 million since 2010.⁠[13]

An article published by the University of Southern California on March 15, 2016 states that he was an undergraduate of the School of Cinematic Arts on a leave of absence and one of the co-founders of the storytelling start-up Visionary VR, and that the VRLA meetups he launched had become so popular that technologists from Silicon Valley traveled to them by chartered bus and enthusiasts flew in from Europe and Asia.⁠[14]

On March 23, 2016 Visionary VR announced a $6 million Series A round led by DFJ, which was oversubscribed; the other participants were The Venture Reality Fund, BDMI, GC VR Gaming Tracker Fund (Greycroft Partners), Vayner/RSE and End Cue, with the individual investors Walter Kortschak, Douglas Purdy, Lee Rierson, Carl Rosendale, Ethan Beard, Jeff Marx and Anamitra Banerj; the company had earlier been backed by Boost VC. DFJ partner Bubba Murarka was to join the company’s board; TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote that this was the company’s first major funding since a $580,000 angel and friends-and-family round.⁠[4][5][15]

The release states that the money would be used to expand the team of virtual reality designers and engineers and to build a commercial version of its software for creating stories inside virtual reality, and it calls VRLA “the world’s largest expo for virtual and augmented reality.” UploadVR wrote that he put the team at 15 people and growing quickly and declined to share more about the software; he said that VRLA would keep growing alongside Visionary VR and that the next expo was set for August 5–6 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.⁠[4][5]

On June 21, 2016 the Thiel Foundation announced the 2016 class of the Thiel Fellowship, which included Cosmo Scharf; the announcement lists his field as virtual reality and describes him as co-founder of The Virtual Reality Foundation and Visionary VR, from Los Angeles, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry.⁠[16]

Road to VR wrote on July 27, 2016 that Visionary VR, which had kept its product secret, would give the first public look at an application for creating stories in virtual reality on August 5, the first day of VRLA Summer Expo 2016; the article calls Jonnie Ross, Adam Levin and him VRLA co-founders and lists them with Gil Baron and Luke Patterson as the founders of Visionary VR.⁠[17]

Lucas Matney of TechCrunch wrote on August 6, 2016 that he had tried Visionary VR’s Mindshow at VRLA on the HTC Vive: users could define a setting and interactive surroundings, choose a character, perform it with their own voice and movements, and take scenes made by friends and alter them; chief executive Gil Baron walked him through the demonstration, and co-founder and chief creative officer Jonnie Ross was also interviewed; the company planned to bring Mindshow to other major platforms, including PSVR and Oculus Rift, and had opened sign-ups for early access.⁠[18]

In episode 420 of Voices of VR, published on August 17, 2016, Kent Bye calls him a co-founder of Visionary VR and VRLA and writes that Visionary VR premiered its interactive storytelling platform Mindshow at VRLA: users record an improvised performance inside the body of a virtual character and then watch it from outside; the early demonstration had only a simple linear capture, in which further characters could be layered over earlier takes. Kent Bye writes that the two discussed the inspirations for Mindshow, including the Buddhist philosophy presented by Alan Watts and Terence McKenna’s ideas of post-symbolic, direct experience. The episode page links his Twitter account under the handle cosmoscharf.⁠[19]

LA Weekly wrote on October 19, 2016 that Visionary’s team included VRLA co-founders Jonnie Ross, Cosmo Scharf and Adam Levin, with Gil Baron as chief executive and Adam Levin as chief operating officer, and that the company worked in a high-rise in downtown Los Angeles; VRLA had grown from meetups into a twice-yearly event at the Los Angeles Convention Center that consistently sold out.⁠[1]

On March 15, 2017 TOA.life published an interview with him; its introduction states that he founded VRLA as a 19-year-old film student, that within three years it had become the world’s largest virtual reality expo, that the speakers he booked for it included John RiccitielloJohn RiccitielloJohn Riccitiello is a games industry executive who served as chief executive of the video game company Electronic Arts and of the game engine company Unity Technologies, and co-founded the private equity firm Elevation Partners.Open the full entry, chief executive of Unity, and that he was a co-founder of the virtual reality software company Mindshow.⁠[20]

He said in the interview: “You’re allowed to jump inside of virtual worlds like no other technology before it”; virtual reality, like any technology, could be a force for good or for evil, for example if a totalitarian government used it to convince its population of an ideology; what Mindshow was about, he said, was enabling other people to express themselves and be more open with each other. On empathy he gave the example of The Machine to be Another, in which two people wearing headsets with cameras facing each other experience being in the other’s body.⁠[20]

He said that in the end there might be no real difference between computer-generated experience and physical sensation (“Ultimately there might not really be a meaningful distinction between them”) and that “Morality itself is going to be challenged with immersive technology,” many ideas that now seem strange, including talking to a dead family member, becoming normal over time. He thought the market for augmented reality could be larger than that for virtual reality, since people might wear augmented reality glasses everywhere, whereas virtual reality equipment was still clunky: “Today, you have to set up your living room with a giant PC”; he said he was very excited about augmented reality, particularly about what AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry might be about to announce.⁠[20]

He said that what excited him most was that “the most powerful potential for immersive technology is to help us see through the illusion of separation”; virtual reality, he said, prompts people to question the nature of reality, as it had done for him over the previous three years. When the interviewer compared his views with those of people in the 1960s who believed that psychedelics expanded the mind, he replied that there were “definitely a lot of parallels,” adding that he had not been alive then but that people were undergoing a revolution in consciousness.⁠[20]

On April 18, 2018 the VR/AR Association (VRARA) published a podcast episode with him as its guest, calling him the co-founder of VRLA and Mindshow; the description states that he recounted how VRLA had started several years earlier and discussed the philosophical questions and opportunities raised by immersive technology. It states that VRLA 2018 was to be held on May 4–5 at the LA Convention Center, with more than 12,000 people and hundreds of exhibitors expected. The episode page likewise links his Twitter account under the handle cosmoscharf.⁠[21]

In episode 710 of Voices of VR, published on October 29, 2018, Kent Bye calls him a VRLA co-founder and writes that he spoke about the deepest levels of the current socio-political and economic context and about how virtual and augmented reality can show that beliefs and the perception of reality are malleable; he held that society suffers from a “values system disorder” in which money is valued above community, culture, education and people’s relationship to the planet, and he discussed alternatives such as a resource-based economy, Ubuntu contributionism and universal basic income.⁠[22]

His project page on Contra states that from August 1, 2021 to October 4, 2023 he was the lead product designer of MovieBot and designed an AI-driven 3D animation application that lets users of any skill level use text prompts to turn their ideas into playful videos; the application combined Unity with GPT-3 for content generation, Azure and ElevenLabsElevenLabsElevenLabs is an artificial intelligence audio company founded in 2022 by Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski. Starting from voice generation, voice cloning, and dubbing tools, it has built ElevenCreative for creators, the enterprise conversational agent platform ElevenAgents, and the developer interface ElevenAPI, and also operates music generation and voice licensing businesses.Open the full entry for text-to-speech, Avaturn for avatars and Blockade Labs for generated backgrounds. He writes that user-experience tests were run with teenagers in high school, that he also designed the product’s visual identity, including its logo, branding and marketing website, and that decisions were guided by Mixpanel data, with 28 product updates shipped.⁠[23]

His profile on Dribbble, by contrast, states that he is the CPO of MovieBot, leading product design and strategy for the AI-powered 3D animation platform; it also states that he has a background in cinematography and film production from the University of Southern California and co-founded the start-ups Mindshow and VRLA. The work history on the profile lists him as co-founder of VRLA from 2014 to 2018 and co-founder of Mindshow from 2014 to 2020.⁠[24]

His profile on Contra describes him as a product designer and mobile and web UX specialist and gives his location as New York, United States; his Dribbble page gives his location as Los Angeles, California, and shows that he joined the site in August 2012.⁠[25][24]

He writes on Contra that since March 8, 2025 he has been developing Cosmic Blueprint as product designer and AI engineer: a minimum viable product of a self-discovery tool that combines 12 ancient and modern wisdom systems, among them Human Design, Gene Keys and the Mayan Tzolk’in, in a single application, built as a mobile-first web application with CursorCursorCursor is the trading name of U.S. AI coding software company Anysphere, Inc. and its namesake coding tool. Founded by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, it began as an AI-native development environment forked from VS Code and later shifted toward agent-centered coding. Its November 2025 Series D valued the company at $29.3 billion post-money; on August 14, 2026, SpaceX completed an all-stock acquisition at an implied equity value of $60 billion, making Cursor a wholly owned subsidiary.Open the full entry, Supabase and Vercel and published at cosmicblueprint.ai.⁠[26]

On another project page, posted on May 10, 2025, he writes that he created Biohackers.Guide, a curated directory website that gathers wellness and biohacking tools, products and brands in one place, using Airtable for its data and Framer for its interface; the page states that the site has launched and received positive feedback from biohackers and wellness enthusiasts.⁠[27]

The Framer community gallery shows that his personal product design portfolio site was published on May 11, 2025, with the description “My personal product design portfolio,” at cosmoscharf.com. The work listed on his Dribbble page includes App Store screenshots for MovieBot, the VRLA logo, the logo and landing page of Rise Sync and a landing page for Vibrophile.⁠[28][29]

Janko Roettgers of Lowpass wrote on July 31, 2025 that, as multiple sources had said, Mindshow had ceased operations and laid off all of its staff. The article states that Mindshow began as a consumer virtual reality company whose application let ordinary users make their own animated shows inside headsets and later, after a change of leadership and a recapitalization, turned to professional productions for Hollywood, with Mattel and Netflix among its partners; the company sought new funding in the spring of 2025 without success.⁠[30]

Personal website: https://www.cosmoscharf.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[31][28][23]

Dribbble: Public profile: https://dribbble.com/cosmoscharf (opens in a new window).⁠[24]

Contra: Public profile: https://contra.com/cosmo_scharf_nghi3xwl (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

Framer: Public profile: https://www.framer.com/@cosmo-scharf/ (opens in a new window).⁠[31]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[32]